A Review of Earlier Articles… and a Return to Metaverse Issues

It was a short piece, mostly referencing an email from Fabian Giesen, a demoscene coder (and more) who was doing some VR work at Valve as a contractor. I’ll be honest, his message was a real downer for me, and I had my own Notch moment. Why was I working towards something that, if successful, would ultimately be used just to provide value to Facebook?

Over the past nine months, a surprising number of you have told me how those early Metaverse articles had actually been very helpful to you. A few of you said that you had a Metaverse effort going, but most of you were creating multiplayer virtual environments. Thank you all for your feedback and support!

I think the moment that it all crystallized and brought me back to Metaversing was seeing the return of Valve with the HTC Vive. Suddenly, it seemed like there were possibilities once again. Thanks, Gabe. I’m looking forward to learning more about your shared entertainment universe… perhaps a non-traditional Metaverse?

As I look back over last year’s body of work, I think most of the pieces have held up well enough. Perhaps the most controversial article was on the Virtual Home. The name, alone, drew an immediate comparison to PlayStation Home (closed in March, 2015), which turns out to be wildly unpopular with VR enthusiasts as the basis for a Metaverse implementation.

PlayStation Home was not where I was heading, so I can agree with much of the upset. Still, the article itself was far too ambitious. I tried to decompress way too many ideas into a short amount of space. I’ve learned my lesson — I’ll try to keep future articles more contained.

The PlayStation Home, now abandoned by Sony

What many of you may not have realized was that most of the articles from last year formed the discrete parts of a global design for a Metaverse. That Metaverse, ultimately, was never described in its entirety. I still have what appears to be a very unique blueprint for a Metaverse that I hope to describe in detail. I’m convinced that this model is not only viable (from multiple vantage points), but that it also has the ability to become wildly successful.

This year I intend to return to my work of laying down more of the design elements and then finally tying it all together. For now, I’ve got to see what happened to some illustrative artwork that was commissioned last year in JanusVR in support of an article I never published. It seems that some of the recent work by Valve (and now Oculus) has made that topic extremely relevant…